Weaving Space Into the Fabric of the (Real-Time) Web

Vint Cerf on the Status of the Interplanetary Internet

Posted on Sunday, October 21, 2007

After expanding across Earth, the Internet is now set to spread into outer space to reach parts no network has gone before, one of its co-creators predicted Wednesday.
Vinton Cerf said the proposed "interplanetary" Internet would allow people an ability "to access information and to control experiments taking place far away" from Earth.

Expanding into the solar system would bring new rules and regulations too, he told an annual Seoul forum, saying he and other experts were working on a set of standards designed to guide space-era Internet communications.

"Finally, the Internet can take us where no network has gone before," said Cerf, who is Google's vice president and chief internet evangelist,

He said he and a team of engineers at the California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory would complete a key part of the project -- establishing standards for space communications like those for Internet -- in three years.

Cerf told a separate news conference that new standards were needed because of the huge distances and time delays involved in communication across space.

He went on: "This effort is now bearing fruit and is on track to be space qualified and standardized in the 2010 time frame.

"Eventually we will accumulate an interplanetary backbone to assist robotic and manned missions with robust communication."